The implications of Obama's current lead

With Barack Obama's estimated lead at 5.6%, the Democrats who panicked during John McCain's bounce are looking pretty silly. It's hard to believe that this was the state of the race a few weeks ago:

Mr. McCain’s choice of Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska as his running mate and the resulting jolt of energy among Republican voters appear to have caught Mr. Obama and his advisers by surprise and added to concern among some Democrats that the Obama campaign was not pushing back hard enough against Republican attacks in a critical phase of the race.

Some Democrats said Mr. Obama needed to move to seize control of the campaign and to block Mr. McCain from snatching away from him the message that he was the best hope to bring change to Washington.

In particular, the failure (thus far) of McCain's vicious negative campaigning should underscore the weakness of the Rovian political approach that has received so much hype over the last decade. Any Republican strategist would have looked like a genius in the post-9/11 period -- the president had sky-high approval ratings. But now that the political environment is unfavorable to Republicans, the Rove playbook (which is being ably executed by Steve Schmidt) has lost much of its potency.

Comments

[Jim Allen]

Don't strategists know the old adage of what happens when you "use a Xerox of a Xerox of a Xerox?" Or maybe it's the law of diminishing returns that's in effect here.

[MartyB]

I am having a hard time understanding your use of the word “vicious” in describing McCain’s campaign. In what way has it been more vicious than Obama’s?

Whose campaign has been encouraging the shouting down of critics on radio shows and sympathetic public officials threatening potential prosecutions for libel. Would that be described as vicious?

Has McCain has been a terrible “lying, liar” in his ads, as the meme now appears to go? , If you believe that, are you falling for the same “conventional wisdom / echo chamber” trap you decry in other posts?

McCain isn’t some sort of saint. He’s politician, just like Obama. And both campaigns have engaged in similar distortions of each other’s records and comments. This is regrettable, but since both campaigns have done it to similar degrees, I look forward to soon reading your description of Obama’s campaign as “vicious”.

[Howard Craft]

I agree with MartyB that this reads as being singularly critical of the McCain campaign, in terms of being "more negative".

Second, what conclusion are you really making?

It seems very imprecise.